Friday, February 25, 2011

Are you a wedding photographer in Toronto? Welcome to the club! It seems there are more of us than there are brides looking for our services. You can chalk it up to the rise of digital photography, newbies misled into thinking wedding photography is easy and extremely profitable (I get a kick out of that one), weekend warriors, etc., etc. There are several reasons for the current saturation of the market but that's material for an entire blog post by itself.

We all have to struggle for visibility so we can get our work seen by the biggest number of potential clients before they move on to the next website.

From late November of last year (2010) until early January of 2011, I had really dropped the ball on my blogging and social media channels, especially Twitter. This translated into my page ranking dropping from 6th page for "Toronto Wedding Photographers" to Page 19, ouch!!! Needless to say I had to get my act together quickly and got blogging right away. I became far more active on Twitter engaging followers and people I follow, instead of posting random quotes and retweeting someone else's content or even worse, spamming people with my latest workshop (again, topic for another blog post). In addition, I started posting ads on Craisglist and Kijiji. I know, that's the last place you want to be found at, but look at it from a different angle. Those two sites generate a tremendous amount of traffic and both of them allow you to incorporate direct links to your website (Craigslist allows actual HTML code in the body of your ad, while Kijiji charges $4 for allowing you to add a link). In other words, you don't have to post bottom feeder offers or anything like that, you can just use the ads to promote your services.

There's more! Even though there are many of us wedding photographers out there, quite a few of us know or at least have heard of other members of our community. Some of us even network with other photographers and develop working relationships with those photographers. Guess what, we can help each other out by commenting on other photographers blogs. I'm not afraid to admit that I follow and admire a lot of other people's work and I'm sure each and every one of us appreciate a flattering comment on the work we do. How does that help, you may ask. Well, it's simple in most of the current blogsite platforms, the fields required for leaving a comment include your e-mail address and a wesbite so once that comment is approved, it eventually becomes and inlink to yours. Having said that, I try not to be a comment-whore (is that even a term?). I just leave comments on blogs of people whose work I truly admire. I couldn't bring myself to leave a comment on crappy work.

Anyway, to recap that whole bunch of babbling above, here are the steps to follow in order to increase your page rank organically:

1. Comments: Be kind and leave comments on other people's blogs whose work you follow and truly admire.

2. Twitter: Use Twitter to engage your followers and also provide useful information, like a link to this blog post for example.

3. Craigslist and Kijiji: Let go of your fears and use these two sites as promotion tools.

4. Blogging: Posting beautiful weddings is all nice and cool but it also helps if you have a secondary blog (which links back to your photography site), where you post actual content, as opposed to just images. Remember, useful content.

Now, has the strategy worked for me? Well, I'm no longer on page 19 but in the last two weeks I've moved to the bottom of page 11.

The amazing thing is that in doing so, my rankings for other keywords increased dramatically. Here's my page rank for the keywords "Toronto Portrait Photographer"

If I were to charge for Landscape Photography commissions, then I'd be pretty happy with myself, as I'm the second listing on page 1 of Google for the keywords "Toronto Landscape Photographer", right above the Luminous Landscape Gallery.

Feel free to leave some feedback on what other kind of information you'd like to see on this blog. Thanks for reading this far.

4 comments:

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